The Downtown Hipster: Hiroya, Part II

In many ways, Hiroya was an innocent, almost an idiot savant. He thought that if he just got out there and made his work known, it was inevitable that people would recognize his genius. In a way he was right, although the main achievement of all his networking lay in attracting the attention of certain washed-up members of the Downtown art crowd. In this way he fell into a scene with people who were much tougher and more cynical than he was, people who saw that he had talent, was entertaining, and—especially, I believe—had a pipeline to money through his family back in Japan. All kinds of moderately famous people began coming around to visit him—he was quick to brag about it—and included him in their schemes, inviting him to gallery openings and parties.

One was Dee Dee Ramone. It’s probably best not to identify the others. Unfortunately for Hiroya, Dee Dee and many of these other unsavory characters were drug addicts.

Hiroya started hanging out with these junkies, going with them to all the parties and clubs. It wasn’t long before Hiroya, too, was using drugs. (At least it got him off the liquor.) Inevitably, it changed him. He would sleep all day and stay out all night. He could no longer sustain his work habits; he piddled away on the same canvases for months and sometimes stopped painting altogether for weeks at a time.

Hiroya had been overweight when he moved into the Chelsea, and he became seriously fat when he decided to hit the bottle. But then, almost overnight, he dropped fifty pounds and became really skinny. It was amazing how quickly he lost the weight. Before I knew the cause of his weight loss I told him that he looked good. “You must be working out or something,” I said. He gave me a sad, weary look as if I had no idea.

The art world remade Hiroya in its own ironic image: his clothes, his philosophy, and even, ultimately, the style of his own art. His new friends convinced him to get rid of his old paint-spattered overalls. They took Hiroya to the tailor and had him fitted with a black Armani suit. Though he looked every bit the part of the hip, Downtown artist, this new attire didn’t suit his lifestyle. Hiroya needed to be an untamed wild man, able to whip out a brush and fling paint around at any time. Soon, despite all the care he took, he had paint all over his new suit.

“You gotta paint in your overalls, Hiroya,” I told him.

“I know, I know,” he said with eyes downcast, as if I was scolding him.

But what would happen was that somebody would ask him for a demonstration, or an inspiration would strike him, and he couldn’t be bothered to change clothes. People asked him why he had been so stupid as to paint in a suit worth several thousand dollars, and he didn’t have much of an answer. Luckily, he had the money to buy another one; in this way he went through several Armani suits in rapid succession.

They put words in his mouth: “Art should be for the people.” How else to explain Hiroya’s embarrassing penchant for going around putting those silly Bunny paintings in all the shops? But Hiroya didn’t care about that; it was all to get his name out there, all about self-promotion. They wanted to make it sound less mercenary, but from Hiroya’s mouth the words only ended up sounding false. What they couldn’t take about Hiroya was his sincerity.They wanted it to be a joke, an ironic wink-and-a-nod of self-promotion.

I was in the hall one time when a Downtown art critic came to see his work. Hiroya was at his best, dragging out all of his canvases, bustling all around, babbling on about the groundbreaking character of his work. As we were viewing the paintings, the critic whispered to me: “I love his act! It’s so obnoxious! He’s so annoying that he’s positively charming!”

Eventually, the art-world hipsters even forced Hiroya to change his painting style. They thought they could tweak it, make it more saleable. They tried to stick him with a more painstaking, intricate style, a style for which he was ill suited. Soon he lost confidence in his own work. He couldn’t finish a canvas, when he had been so productive before. After a while I was embarrassed for him and stopped asking to see his new work, because I knew he would show me the same old unfinished canvases I had seen a million times before. He spent less and less time in his room painting and more time in the lobby bothering people. Increasingly, too, he spent more and more time away from the Chelsea, on the street, finding drugs. He dried up creatively.

So what did the art-world hipsters do for Hiroya? Well, for one thing, they were able to arrange interviews and pictorial spreads for him in several magazines. One of these occasions was how they got him to start wearing a suit. It was an article about what artists wear, artist’s fashion, in Vogue Italia. Of course, he couldn’t wear his overalls for this: that wouldn’t sell any clothes. He bought his first Armani suit for the photo shoot, and then, since everybody told him how good he looked and praised him to the high heavens, he was easily persuaded to switch to this look permanently.

They used the magazine articles to create a mythology for Hiroya; I remember one particularly ridiculous article that claimed that he slept in a coffin. (They apparently got the idea from Sarah Bernhardt, who really did sleep in a coffin when she lived at the Chelsea—or maybe that was all hype too.) In all the times I was in his room, I never saw any evidence of this. I asked him about it once, about whether he ever slept in a coffin like they said, and he became embarrassed and was kind of evasive. He said, “Oh, sometimes. No more.”

The art-world people got Hiroya into a group show at the Gershwin Hotel, which is sort of a knockoff of the Chelsea, a bohemian theme hotel for slumming hipsters. Hiroya put up a huge yellow banner on the side of the hotel in his graffiti style, proclaiming: Yellow Is The New Black. Besides the trite slogan, it was an impressive work and it hung there for several months, even long after the show had closed. Though they never did get him a real gallery show, they introduced him to rich people who liked his work and potentially might buy it. Hiroya was proud of these acquaintances and put up a sort of shrine to them on his door: pictures of himself standing with famous designers, artists, actors, and musicians.

If he hadn’t been so dysfunctional to begin with and, by this point, so incapacitated by drugs, Hiroya might have been able to parlay this exposure into a real success. However, when people showed a willingness actually to fork over some money, Hiroya would tell them to go to hell if he didn’t like them.